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Campus Organizer's Guide to Democratizing Education

December 21, 2006

Eric Prindle

An organizing guide for students, faculty, staff, and community members interested in promoting democracy in higher education, and a higher education system in service to a democratic, inclusive, society.

Liberty Tree's Democratizing Education Program is pleased to release the Campus Organizer's Guide to Democratizing Education, authored by our Associate, Eric Prindle, a recent graduate of NYU Law. Prindle wrote the guide for students, faculty, staff, and community members interested in promoting democracy in higher education, and a higher education system in service to a democratic, inclusive, society.

From the introduction to the guide . . .

As students, faculty, and staff at campuses around the country organize around issues like tuition reform, affirmative action, and labor rights, very often they find themselves coming up against a deficit of democracy on their campuses. Although universities and colleges are supposed to be structured to serve the needs of students and the interests of the general public, they are usually controlled by a small group of administrators who increasingly tend to have a corporate mindset that excludes democratic participation by their “employees” and “customers.”

. . . .

Other guides, handbooks, manuals, etc. are out there to teach you about “organizing” or more specifically “grassroots organizing” as general subjects. This guide is less of a how-to manual than most of those. It is less about skill sharing and more about experience sharing. As new generations of students, staff, and faculty deal with the question of democracy on their campuses, many of the same issues come up over and over again. The purpose of this guide is to look at what these issues are and what we can learn from what’s worked and what hasn’t in the past.

Did you ... suppose democracy was only for elections, for politics, and for a party name? I say democracy is only of use there that it may pass on and come to its flower and fruit in manners, in the highest forms of interaction ... in religion, literature, colleges and schools: Democracy in all public and private life.